


Being Human

by Asimiento



Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-14
Updated: 2019-06-20
Packaged: 2020-05-07 18:23:51
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 7,777
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19214998
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Asimiento/pseuds/Asimiento
Summary: On the other side of Armageddon, the world continued to turn to the unfathomable hand of the divine. Somewhere within, an angel and a demon stirred awake to find that they had, inexplicably, turned human.





	1. Are you there, God? It's me, Crowley.

**Author's Note:**

> "No doubt the next chapter  
> in my book of transformations  
> is already written.  
> I am not done with my changes."  
> — **Stanley Kunitz** (from _The Layers_ )

A year had come to pass since the End of Days came and went.

The seasons shifted as irregularly as usual, the world turning to the unknowable, unfathomable hand of God, Themselves. Sunlight stretched from the east, same as it always had, the theatre of nighttime peeling back its great curtain, the glittering fineness of its star-strewn stuff shrinking far and away to the other side. Over the clouds, birds swirled and soared in confusion, deliberating following the usual migratory patterns despite good sense cautioning against it, what with all the changes in the weather. Further down in London, cars skittered through highways as smoke and fog frothed over the city, while a collective groan came in the thousands as children began to haul themselves out of bed for another day of school.

A normal start to a normal day, all things considered.

Except, that is, for the strange sensation that overcame one particular demon stirred from sleep. His limbs felt heavier than usual, groggy as if he’d been drinking the night previous and had somehow forgotten to sober up. His feet, upon hitting the marble floor, curled involuntarily from the cold, forcing him to walk on his toes on the way to the kitchen. There, he brewed a pot of coffee, as was his habit, and the first sip unexpectedly burnt his tongue. Later, in the shower, the water sprayed intolerably hot. As he wiped the film of steam from the mirror, he startled.

Unfamiliar eyes stared back, burnished gold dulled to a muddy brown, irises smoothed to a gentle roundness. 

Across the hall, the houseplants lay still, unmoved by the shrill, all-too-human scream that rumbled from somewhere in the flat.

One of the many exasperating things about inhabiting a body that had suddenly become human in every sense, Crowley was beginning to learn, was the abiding presence of fear. The small pricks of disquiet from near-slips in the bathroom to split-seconds of pure despair over speeding trucks swerving sharply past, the Bentley eventually slowing to a cautious trundle as it reached the curb of the usual bookshop. A horn blared at him as he stepped onto the street, and along the overstuffed corner people shoved, some ducking apologetically out of the way. 

Before Crowley could get to the door, the bell clinked. On the threshold stood the bookshop’s proprietor, nursing a mug of tea, wearing an expression as soft and certain as that of stone angels perched over archways, greeting believers into the hallowed sanctum within. 

“Really, my dear, you could have just called,” Aziraphale huffed.

Crowley stomped in, dragging his feet through the carpeted floor. He rounded the bookshop’s perimeter once, stopping to lay a hand on the bronze doorknob. It snapped back from a jolt of static.

“Fuck!” He exclaimed at the doorknob, which remained resolutely still, shiny and taunting.

“Oh please. You would have conducted the static regardless.”

“Yes, but it wouldn't have hurt.”

“Now, there's no need to be dramatic.”

“Dramatic? Dramatic! What do you think this is, just some minor mixup? A little glitch in the matrix?”

“A _what?_ ”

Crowley threw the sunglasses off his face and turned. Aziraphale blinked. A mug fell and cracked onto the floor. Neither could will the mess away, and so they stared downward, gazing uselessly at the growing puddle.

The tea grew cold before either spoke again.

“So…” said the one who was, likely, no longer an angel.

“Yeah,” sighed the other, who was likewise possibly no longer of angel stock.

Electing to ignore the mess, Aziraphale hovered near one of the doddering stacks of books. “We’re human. For the meantime.”

Crowley slouched onto the settee across. “Maybe it’s punishment,” he said, a hand waving in defeat. “God did love a good punishment, after all.”

“Oh, it’s been ages since They did any of that.” Aziraphale made a vague gesture meant to encompass that time with all the floods, the plagues, and the smiting. “Perhaps it’s a test?”

“A test! Please, spare me.” Crowley sank further into the cushion, hands swiping over his face, dragging through his hair in maddened panic. “All these tests that somehow go according to plan—the expected eating of the fruit from the tree, the expected filicide, the expected unexpected betrayal, the expected slip-up with the baby switch. Those aren’t tests, those are… they’re more like… well, they’re games!” He threw his hands up in capitulation, for dramatic flair. 

Reining in his dudgeon, Aziraphale straightened his posture. “God does not play _games_ ,” he argued, with an indignant little sniff.

The trouble with that defense was that God, in fact, often did just that. However, neither had any way of knowing if this was yet another instance of such games. After all, it had been the other side of Armageddon. Nobody had heard from the Almighty, Themselves, in quite some time.

Spending the day exhaustively searching for whatever clues they could find from old religious tomes or the more twisted corners of the internet, the two sulked helplessly on their usual seats, fatigued and listless despite all the coffee. Outside, the sky turned dark. Sleep, which had in the past been a habit they’d gotten into mostly to pass idle time, grew heavy on them now. After some resistance, Crowley found himself accosted, brought to the room upstairs, shoved onto an old and underused mattress, trapped under heavy blankets, in a temperate room with a single warm lamp lit on the bedside table.

He rolled to the farther edge of the bed and reached over, expecting… _something_. He rubbed his eyes and squinted. Aziraphale was standing by the door, ready to leave.

“Where are you going?” Crowley mumbled. 

The angel-who-maybe-wasn’t-for-now shrugged apologetically. “Back downstairs; a bit more reading,” he said. “Humans tend to miss things the first time around, after all.” 

Crowley tried not to look too disappointed. He closed his eyes, letting the sound of footsteps softly fading out pull him into the tide of sleep.

 

* * *

 

A month in and being human, in Crowley's experience, with all its attendant inadequacies, tended to be inconvenient in every way possible. Cities, with their wide motorways and myriad invisible hostilities, proved frustrating to navigate without the aid of demonic or divine intervention alike. Maintenance work, which involved regular feeding and emptying, hygiene and grooming, physical activity and listless sleep, grew taxing once the novelty wore off. The virtues of doxological piousness, immaculate abstinence, benevolence and bereftness turned sanctimonious in the face of human urgencies.

In the blur and confusion of it all, eating a magical apple that promised to make sense of the world in all its terrible grandeur seemed like a pretty reasonable decision. Despite the literal warning signs.

Disdaining the unconscionably high rise of rental costs in London, Crowley eventually moved into the bookshop with Aziraphale, who had the foresight to own the title to that cramped space in Soho. A little over a week in, he'd gotten into the habit of waking just before sunrise to stare heavenward at the oculus, beseechingly or contemptuously, depending on how he'd slept the night before. As the sun crept up, motes of dust would dance through the fuzz of light, as silent, ever-present, and indifferent as the Lord.

Aziraphale, inexplicably, had taken to the change all too gracefully. His breathless reverence for the human ingenuity that birthed all manner of craftsmanship carried over to a natural delight in slow, careful, rewarding work. Learning to cook added a new dimension to his appreciation of food, repairs via needlework and machine sewing revealed the artistry and skill poured into the continental fineries he'd amassed throughout the centuries. Crowley's plants had gleamed with a healthy polish, proudly shooting up and fanning out, no verbal threats necessary. He'd even begun to keep bees in the rooftop, despite building restrictions and zoning regulations. 

The angel who no longer was had come to appreciate time, and how much humans could do, granted so little of it. When springtime showers crested to an almighty deluge and trapped them indoors, he'd silently reveled in the ability of a good book to whisk him away to countless elsewheres, from the comfort of his own worn couch.

Being human truly suited him.

Mostly, Crowley found it annoying.

He'd wandered downstairs earlier than usual for the daily staring contest with God, when he found Aziraphale in the kitchen. His hands fiddled with a long metal skewer as he watched over the oven. Inside, a pan of dough gently ballooned and browned into what would soon be fresh bread.

From the threshold, Crowly cleared his throat.

Somehow this led to Aziraphale startling, turning to stare at Crowley, then hurriedly looking away in embarrassment. The skewer clattered over the marble countertop. Belatedly, Crowley noticed the other pans with batches of dough in varying degrees of burnt.

“It's a lot trickier than I'd expected,” Aziraphale muttered.

Crowley wandered in and began to poke at one of the poor deflated things. “Well, if that one ever ends up just as bang-up as the rest of these, I could always get some bread from Tesco.” As he flaked the burnt batches and gathered them into a brown paper bag, he noticed Aziraphale staring with what seemed to be the full force of his regard.

It made Crowley shiver.

He made a show of shrugging half-heartedly. “The ducks will eat anything,” he muttered, giving the paper bag a good shake as he rolled the top closed. 

The not-an-angel smiled, rather angelically. “Thank you, my dear,” he said, in a gentle timbre that managed to somehow retain some celestial qualities. A sound that struck a chord that reverberated in a hollow chamber of the soul, sweeping and plunderous.

Crowley turned away quickly, hurrying out and down the stairs to glare wordlessly at God once more.

 

* * *

 

The most enduring strand of philosophical inquiry humanity has struggled with for millennia is that which concerns the nature of good and evil. For example, would it be better to disdain the apple from the tree and live a sheltered life of blissful ignorance or take the fruit and suffer all the complex sublimities the world has to offer? Often, such investigations have led to the conclusion that ethical dilemmas were rarely pure, and never simple, therefore the best way to go about them was to simply negotiate trade-offs.

Concisely put: are the rewards gained worth the consequences endured? It was a question Crowley had idly considered in the abstract, mostly to fine-tune his more artful temptations with the intricate trappings of interior turmoil. What he hadn’t considered was how heavily the question would continue to plague him, the longer he remained human. 

Somehow, the question followed him all the way to the supermarket.

He’d picked up and put back the nth carton of milk on the shelf before electing to ignore milk altogether. “Maybe everything is bad,” he muttered guiltily.

From the other end of the aisle, Aziraphale shook his head. “Don’t be ridiculous.” He strode over, took the carton from the shelf and simply placed it in the cart.

On the bus home, Crowley fidgeted. He stared down at his polished leather shoes to quiet the part of his mind that entertained thoughts about veganism. The shoes were perfect, from the glossy snakeskin to the bright red sole.

At some point, Aziraphale nudged his shoulder. “Crowley, what’s gotten into you?”

Crowley looked up and out, watching a blur of city lights and semiotics pass through the window. He sighed melodramatically. “The climate—”

“Oh. Well, we have been having a rather unseasonably cold August.”

“—great big slouching, protracted, man-made Armageddon.” 

“I beg your pardon?”

“Ten years. Ten years left, and then all of this goes…” incapable of reducing the concept of a global ecological disaster into appropriate terms, Crowley gestured helplessly, an unsatisfactory wave of a hand in the manner of wafting vapor.

“Crowley you are not making any sense.”

Two hours and three bottles of wine later, and Aziraphale had finally, blessedly begun to catch his drift.

“Oh dear, not again…” 

Crowley draped himself over the whole couch, brandishing a bottle of red by the neck. Its last ounce swirled feebly to his exuberant gesticulations. “All of those burning fuels turning into toxic air. Fish choking on little plastic bits. Sludge and heavy metals getting into the soil. The sea levels. Islands will sink. And the trees. Those ancient tortoises. So old…”

“And they don’t even know they’re doing it…”

“Oh, they know all right. They definitely know. How do you think I know?” 

“How?” 

“ _Bloody internet._ ” 

Slumped on a seat at the opposite end of the room, Aziraphale watched the bottle fall from his companion’s hand, roll down the uneven floor and nudge the leg of an old stool, which wobbled and tipped over the model wooden globe that sat atop it. The globe tipped over, fell off its mounting, and rolled lifelessly across the Persian carpet. Aziraphale picked it up and stared at it helplessly, an impotent god worrying over a wilting paper and gauze dominion.

For a moment, all the charm of being human vanished, somehow replaced by a sweeping, overwhelming, unshakeable terror.

 

* * *

  

And lo, the Lord hath said, _it is not good for man to be alone_.

This was mostly a matter of practicality, as people tended to fare terribly in solitude, with all the constant caring and repair work needed. They were especially dreadful when they got sick, and prolonged isolation tended to bloat into numbing boredom or queasy paranoia. Hence it came to be that people would often travel in pairs, seemingly by design, since those first blessed days spent in the sumptuous greens of Eden, to the present. 

All over St. James’ Park, pairs strolled through the gravelly avenues and lounged about the orchards and lobbed balls through iron hoops and watched over the long stretch of the canal, tossing bread into the mouths of its local ducks. At the edge of the damp grass, several hatchlings walked in single file behind their mother. It wasn't good for ducks to be alone either.

Somewhere in the park, a pair of ordinary people broke off a twin ice lolly into halves, for sharing.

A pelican looked up at Crowley expectantly, if he could perhaps break off another half for the poor thing. He shooed it away with his foot. The pelican raised its beak resentfully, waddling along the pathway, searching for softer passers-by to finagle.

“Oh, I didn’t think I could love this more,” Aziraphale said.

Crowley looked up at the vista before them. Drooping branches swayed to the breeze, dipping into water that glistened like a fine silk curtain, framed by greenery flush with blossoms and people walking in pairs, practically gliding on their feet.

It was a nice day out. Practically perfect, if not exactly right for the season.

“Looks the same as always,” Crowley said.

“It takes a lot of care to tend to a place like this.”

“Takes a lot of deception to make it. There used to be a hospital in this spot.” 

“Things always come and go, my dear.”

That was undeniable. All over the world, people came and went, disturbing the living land in their wake, transforming places for better or for worse. In London, they put up farmlands that turned into wood and stone establishments that turned into glinting high rises made of glass and slate and steel.

Crowley leaned back, slouching lower over the bench. He watched a pair of elderly women tossing bits of old baguette at waiting ducks. They stood at the water's edge, shoulder to shoulder, a hand each resting over the same cane. Crowley felt abruptly pained. He would later learn that this was the precise feeling of being moved.

“Do you suppose we’ll age, now?” He asked.

Aziraphale kept his gaze to the view around them, taking a deep breath and basking in the ordinariness of it all. “I suppose we might,” he answered. Then he turned to meet his constant companion’s eyes. “Somehow, I don’t think I’d mind that at all.” 

Crowley imagined more days like this. More of the tedium that had become a fixture in their current predicament—days spent in hospitals, hours spent in queues, more monotonous chores and human work. More days residing under the same roof, for economic reasons.

Aziraphale regarded him with a solemn look. There might have been a few more lines in his face, now. The smile he gave had a forlorn quality to it. It was the smile that people gave when they felt sorry for you. Crowley mostly felt ashamed about being on its receiving end.

That abrupt pain came back and took residence somewhere in his chest, tightening his ribs and quickening his heart in anatomically impossible ways. 

“Good for you,” he said.

They took one last stroll through the park, then rode the bus back home.

 

* * *

 

Exactly a year had passed since an angel and a demon stirred awake only to find themselves inexplicably turned human. Confidently, both could say the experience was not entirely unpleasant. It was trying, exhausting, and tedious. Bodies were frail, incompetent things that suffered the yoke of a harsh world and the ineffable whims of the divine.

Crowley had missed certainty, more than anything. The security of it so long as particular things were done to lock events into place. It meant plans were met and the world turned according to an unchanging order. Life was governable, smooth, mostly comfortable and therefore easy.

Part of being human meant only being certain of your own thoughts. Not that they were _correct_ , but that they were _present_ , and that thoughts being present meant one _existed_. The barest minimum proof of living, which only sharpened in the extremes—from devastating fear to overwhelming joy.

He took to driving the Bentley all the way to the countryside hoping to chase those extremes in either direction, until he’d gotten ticketed and realized he hadn’t been as convincing a negotiator without the aid of the reliable occult charm.

He still took drives out of London anyway. Uneventful, pleasant sojourns. He’d also gotten into the habit of taking someone else along, whenever the mood struck.

Aziraphale kept his gaze outward, watching the view shift from the drab grey of the city to the verdant fields that tumbled far and ahead. As the sun dipped, an internecine crimson clashed with bright blue, bruising the sky with a hazy purple. The stars were brighter, the air was crisp, and up ahead rose escarpments dotted with trees, cut across by a winding river that fanned out toward the channel.

Crowley had meant to entertain the idea of moving out to Sussex. He turned to his companion with a bold, entrepreneurial eagerness that promptly vanished as he caught Aziraphale sulking, uncharacteristically.

“Something wrong, angel?”

He’d gotten an unconvincing little head shake in response. A hand was waved and a smile was attempted. The man looked wistful and weepy. He was definitely in a rare _mood_.

“Oh, it’s nothing. And you know I’m not—”

“Sorry, force of habit.”

They both looked the other way, then to the road ahead.

There was a French expression for awkward silences: _“Un ange passé.”_   _An angel passed by._ Whether the angel passing made a poor attempt at relieving awkward silences or caused them was anybody’s guess. Neither of the two knew where the expression came from. They had always suspected it had been the other's fault.

In the car, they kept silent. Enough to hear the wind churn and sheep bleat.

Snapping out of his stupor, Aziraphale said, “it’s been a year, to the day.”

Crowley, of course, had been aware. He was aware of how long it had been, down to the minute.

He concentrated on the path to the cottage, disdaining those lingering tendrils of despair that creeped in at the most inconvenient moments. There was no getting used the dread of being cast out, without warning. He’d gone through it twice, now.

“So it has,” he simply said.

“Maybe it’s time to accept that the door’s really been closed on us now.”

The sky turned dark as they drove along. They could hear the faint crash and fall of water to the shore. The chalky cliffs towered over the view, pure white and massive as the halls of heaven, above.

They’d gotten to the cottage too tired to do more than bring the bags in, empty their bowels, and fulfill the tedious necessities of human maintenance work.

Crowley flopped on their one bed with hair still damp from a long, hot shower. He closed his eyes and reached over, expecting a warm weight on the other side. It remained cold and unoccupied. Frustrated, he rose up and crept out the room, stalking through the cottage twice before he realized he’d been alone all this time.

Out on the coarse sand, standing barefoot and facing the water was a man who once hadn’t been, who might have been belatedly feeling the shock of exile. It was cold out, and he hadn’t thought to take a coat with him. He was shivering by the time Crowley came by to drop a blanket over him.

“You could catch a cold, out here,” said the man who was a demon, once.

“I’ll be fine,” responded the man who clearly wasn’t fine at all.

They huddled under the blanket and said nothing more, content to watch the surf pull in until the foam stretched far enough to reach their feet.

When they retreated to the cottage, Aziraphale straightened out the old lumpy sofa by the corner, near the porch. Crowley hovered by the threshold, waiting for him to set everything to order before knocking on the doorframe to get his attention.

“What do you think you’re doing?” He said.

Aziraphale merely pointed to the couch. He made an attempt to speak, then abandoned it for an expeditious wave of a hand. As they watched each other from across the room, another angel might have passed.

And then a man who had once been an angel, then the opposite, then hovered between both until he was neither, had stepped out of the threshold, stopped at the middle and waited. On the other side, a man who’d retained the qualities of an angel that mattered, even when he no longer was, drew closer and joined him. 

They kissed the way humans did when they were feeling especially wanting.

That sharpness struck again. The deep, devastating sear of being alive. It swung to both extremes, rapturous and ineffable—the quickening beat of terror and elation, ache and exultation. As close as people got to surrendering to the mysteries of the divine.

Crowley had meant to lead them both to the bed. He got pulled down to the sofa instead.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It's been more than a decade since I'd last picked up Good Omens, so watching the show and revisiting the source has been so much fun.
> 
> Next chapter is from Aziraphale's point of view, and shall be more or less what is called a "mood piece."
> 
> Comments are love!


	2. Heaven is a place on earth.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> As for the rest of it…

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "In a murderous time  
> the heart breaks and breaks  
> and lives by breaking."  
> — **Stanley Kunitz** (from _The Testing Tree_ )

There had been a caravansary along the Great Steppe, set by a great flowing strip of water, where travelers lounged while cattle grazed. People rode horses, which had been a new development that changed the ease and speed and therefore the popularity of human travel. Nevertheless, travel remained harsh and exhausting. People traveled, guided by no more than starlight and whatever proof of faith they could scrounge up from the unforgiving terrain. They moved from craggy plains to steep cliffs to grasslands that became freezing wastes at night, world-weary and wanting, looking for solace and sustenance.

All sorts of people would gather—from the Frankish and the Punic, to the Manchu and the Oghuz. In those days, those places were rare, and all the more remarkable for it. All God’s curious creatures had come together, broken bread together and lain together. Aziraphale loved all sorts of people, so of course he loved that place. 

Then lo the Lord hath said, _let ruin come upon the land and its lavish people._

Animals wasted away, the water dried up and the land rotted in the heat. Stores of grain and meat turned black. No tribe could go any farther down the road before they found themselves falling ill. They returned to the caravansary crawling on their hands and feet, the skin falling off their backs.

They were all damned. For a test.

A trial from God, the other angels had said. What would it take for human beings to succumb to depravity and reject the heavenly virtues of purity and deprivation? Given the right circumstances people often turned on each other, slaves to their lowly bodily indulgences, but what would it take before they start slaughtering each other for meat? Were they more demon than angel, after all?

_It’s an experiment, Aziraphale, don’t be so naïve._

The humans suffered as the angels observed and recorded and took stock of every gasp, every plea, every rejection of God for having forsaken them. And so they were pleased. And so the will of the Lord was done.

Then one day, a demon showed up and the hunger was replaced with plenty.

A miracle. Or, a curse.

It hadn't mattered which it was. What had mattered was that they would live, and not the consolation of mere survival. Of bargaining for just another day. They would live. And they would feel alive.

Overjoyed to bursting, the travelers ate until they were full, danced until they collapsed, and they drank wine enough that it could flood the stream, were it still dry. On the third day of festivities, Aziraphale spotted the demon, who'd once been a serpent in a garden, urging man and woman to take more than they could handle. His eyes bore the curse of delivering that first instance of transgression. They glowed golden and beckoned.

Aziraphale actually thought they were rather nice eyes.  _(But then again, Aziraphale thought plenty of odd things looked nice. No one, celestial or occult or otherwise would have looked to him for his views on aesthetics.)_

The demon came to him, offering one of those drinks that made the humans blind and incoherent. It had the fragrance of flowers and spices. With a few drops of water, it slowly transformed from liquid clear as the purest water into cloudy white, turning opaque to conversely reveal its secrets. White ribbons bloomed like the most ancient kind of magic, before the earth had been born, when the oldest of stars had only started to funnel out from the great cosmic egg. It danced somewhere in between divine and dark.

“What’s in it?” The angel asked.

“No clue. It’s what everybody else is having,” the demon answered. He sipped on his glass and made an inscrutable face.

They watched the humans sharing drinks and passing bowls of soup around. The sound of exuberance clattered all around like rain after a long drought. The relief of being able to live another day had swelled to rapture. Some, overcome with passion, had joined their fellow survivors openly and intimately, beards brushing as mouths joined, heedless of any prying eyes among the wild surf of men.

It made Aziraphale turn away and finish his drink a little too quickly.

It tasted like ointment.

The demon laughed as the angel choked on the drink.

“Awful stuff, isn’t it?” He said. “These people just want to get hammered into oblivion and give into their lowly indulgences, given the chance. Take their comforts away and… well, you saw what happened.”

The angel waved the drink away. The liquid in the glass turned into water. “They didn't deserve it,” he said, a little too quietly.

The demon merely sat back and clapped him on the shoulder, forcefully. “Hey, don't look so glum! Bad things happen to all sorts of people. Who’s to say who deserves what?”

“It wasn’t fair.”

“What is _fair?_ ”

Aziraphale huffed. “Appropriate punishment equal to the exact transgression is what—”

“Oh please!” The demon interrupted. “There’s nothing fair about the weather. Nothing fair about disease. Crops will rot and rivers dry up, the earth shakes and bridges collapse. These things just happen anyway, to the good and evil alike. And besides, every human has to die someday. That’s the one thing the good ol’ God guaranteed: _people die._ Everybody _dies._  Doesn’t matter if they deserve it, doesn’t matter if it happens horribly. The point is, it happens.”

The demon held his gaze. Aziraphale was unfazed.

“You saved them,” he parried.

“I saw an opportunity.”

“You saw a way to let them live.”

The demon shrugged. “They succumbed to temptation. They're on the path downwards now.”

“They were desperate.”

“Desperate enough to renounce the Lord? What was that about blessing those who hunger and thirst?”

“They were dying!”

“And now they’ll live the rest of their lives ravenous, indulgent, and spiteful of God.” The demon gestured to the people with an expansive sweep of a hand.

Aziraphale watched the hand’s path and saw only people flush with a zest for new life. They were happy simply to be around. Their laughter was bright as lemons.

“As long as they live, there's still time. Anybody can be redeemed,” he said.

And then the demon leaned closer, as poised and self-possessed as ever. He lowered his voice to a conspiratorial whisper. “Just as anybody can be tempted, angel,” he said.

And then the demon left.

The next day, all was well along the Steppe. People came and left to travel all over. Westward to the gleaming blue Aegean, an empire was on the move. In mere decades, ruin would return in the form of callous men, razing the path until no peoples of the road tread on. The caravansary died a slow, quiet, pitiful death.

And so it was written.

It took another century before Aziraphale saw Crowley again. The next times they crossed paths, they merely shared a meal and enjoyed the other’s strange and strangely comfortable company. They drank wine in Damascus and split bowls of stew in Iberia, coffee in Tobago and yassa in Dakar. Horses crossed mountains and ships crossed oceans and planes cut through the expansive sky and brought men to places where they took and were taken. All around them, people were born and breathed and died, walls stood tall and collapsed, cities rose and were razed, the tides crested to the pull of the moon, and the planet turned along to the great golden eye of the sun. The world changed. They simply watched.

On a bed in a cottage, by a beach overlooking white cliffs of chalk, more than a thousand years later, Aziraphale thought of the Steppe, of the plague, and that one transgressive miracle.

He turned over and watched the rise and fall of a chest that breathed peacefully in sleep, as people did, and as those of angel stock did not. They had been breathing for a little over a year now, and he hadn’t noticed. He hadn’t noticed how their skin flushed pink with the flow of blood angels would have no use for, and how they wrapped themselves in coats and under blankets for warmth angels did not crave. In sleep they were plunged into a theatre of dreams, while in the morning they would sometimes be stirred by the curious sensation of hunger. Food and drink, which they had previously enjoyed mostly because they were curious, and because it was good, became a necessity. So had the comfort of company. Of love.

It meant that they were human, still.

And that there would be no more miracles for them to cast. For now, at least.

Atop the bed, the blanket shifted.

“Something on your mind?” Crowley asked, slurred and halfway out of sleep.

“What makes you say that?”

“Something’s always on your mind.”

A tongue began to slowly trace a line along an exposed neck. A left hand wandered over valleys and hills and alluvial dips of skin. His fingers were cold. Aziraphale closed his eyes and tried not to think too much about where it wandered.

“I dreamt about some place we'd stumbled upon each other,” he said. “It was a very long time ago. There was an inn along Ankara, by an old river. Great place, plenty of people coming in from all sorts of places, Greeks to the Chinese. People figured out how to breed horses there, for the first time if I recall. It was lovely. So lovely. Then it fell to an epidemic. You remember that, don’t you?”

“Nope, not ringing any bells.” Under the blanket, a hand kept wandering.

“You were there.”

“Was I? Can’t recall.” The hand roved and roamed.

“There was a disease and drought that killed the caravan travelers and their livestock. Some almost wasted away but more turned vicious. I hadn’t known until a week in that it was a test. God wanted to see if they got desperate enough to kill each other for meat. Or, at least that’s what the other angels—”

“Oh come on,” Crowley interrupted. “Don’t talk about _that_ while I'm—”

“Those people were going to die until you came along.”

Then, he stopped. Crowley propped himself up by an elbow and threw Aziraphale an irritated look. “Well, that doesn’t sound like something I’d have done,” he said.

Aziraphale made no effort to hide his amusement. “You dangled a basket of food and medicine in front of them and told them you’d throw it their way if they renounced God,” he simply said. “A basket that miraculously never ran out as long as people chanted _‘hail Satan'_ to it.”

“Ah, now I remember.”

“You liked that place, too.”

“Of course I did. Lot of souls to take, and such.”

“Oh, my dear…” An incredulous look was lobbed.

A sneer was parried back. “ _What?_ ”

“You didn’t have to do it. You could have waited for them to do what you would have expected people to do."

"Hmmph."

"You wanted to help them.”

“Believe what you want to believe, angel.”

Aziraphale sighed.

Crowley raised an inquisitive brow.

Neither spoke, refusing to budge.

They watched each other. For a few moments they were still, content to simply gaze.

The weekend they’d meant to spend at the cottage had turned into a week, and was now well on its way to a fortnight. On the second day, Crowley had joked that they could sell the bookshop and make the move a permanent one. On the sixth, he’d offered to sell the car. He’d made it out to be a trivial suggestion, but Aziraphale might have gotten a little too verklempt about it. That night, there had been kneeling in a mockery of genuflection and the taking of bodies into mouths with the enthusiasm and spirit that the gospel suggested, despite whatever chastity churches would demand. More knowing each other in the Biblical sense. They’d both called out to God loudly, repeatedly, passionately, and entirely accidentally.

Outside, the waves of the English channel crashed over the rocky shore.

Aziraphale sighed, rather morosely. “I just miss it,” he said.

“You miss the time before people invented modern medicine?”

“No, I mean…” A time when he’d thought of people as curious, helpless things? “I miss…” A time when he’d been more able than most people?

Crowley shook his head “Hmm?”

The man who had been angel once made a meaningless gesture, as vague as the Lord was ineffable.

“Err…”

“Oh, stop.”

The man who had been a demon once simply leaned over and kissed him on the lips.

“I know what you mean,” he said.

Those hands roamed again.

It thrilled them both to discover how much pleasure joined human bodies could produce, and how naturally it all came to them. How love could reduce one to their simplest parts—a soft animal that delights, a bundle of nerves that feel, a mere thing that wants and wants and wants.

Demon or not, Crowley had remained skilled in the clandestine enterprise of theft. An angel had no heart to be stolen, but his had been taken anyway, years and years ago. Far longer than Aziraphale realized, perhaps. He’d taken note of every small gesture, from sharing his enthusiasm over some new thing the humans had invented, to small favors, to repeated rescues from inconvenient discorporation. He’d always wondered then if Crowley had merely been genuinely kind without realizing it, or if it was all part of a long game.

_Anybody can be tempted,_ Crowley had said.

_Just as anybody can be saved,_ Aziraphale had meant to say, all those years ago.

And he'd picked up the gauntlet. He'd played the game. If there ever was one at all, to begin with.

It threatened to tear a threshold open—bright as the rise to the skies, damning as the fall downwards.

But they'd both crossed over. They were human now—vulnerable to all those human flaws, open to all those new possibilities. Yoked by neither God nor the Devil. And he’d been loved, still. All at once an outpour had burst through the dam of heaven’s unyielding indifference.

They drank their fill after a long drought. Human affection, divine grace, and whatever else lay in between.

There was so much catching up to do. Bodies were mortal, after all. They no longer had forever to wait.

 

* * *

 

They’ve been human for five years, now.

People usually practiced and passed on traditions to mark the passing of time. Seasonal festivities for a broader collective sweep, singular milestones for the personal and specific. Crowley had decided that the day Armageddon had come and gone, which had been the day they turned human, would officially be their birthday. It had been a sort of rebirth, after all—for the world and for the both of them.

Neither knew exactly how to go about it. Tradition was meant to transcend time, and birthdays were as much about time as they were about mortality. Usually, people began with a definite reference point. They had no idea how old they were, in any sense.

Somehow, a birthday gathering in the conventional sense managed to put itself together, without their knowledge, therefore without their consent. Coincidences lined up to place the same people in the same spot at the same point in time, and the spangled trappings of celebration came along with them. It had been awfully suspicious, almost like a miracle. Anathema and Newt had decided to take a trip to the coast, and they’d brought a tin of Victoria sponge just because it had felt right to. The Youngs came to the country as well, with the Them and Dog in tow, and they’d brought sticks of sparklers to complement the glittering expanse of night time in the country. Shadwell and Madame Tracy had “been in the area” and came along with wine.

They were all there, along the same beach, heedless of their strange and ominous proximity.

And then Dog had scampered over to the edge toward the cottage, mouth carrying sticks of lit sparklers, chased by an Antichrist, a cadre of teenagers, a practical occultist and former professional descendant, two former witch finders, and a sometimes medium. Down the coastline, sparklers crackled like a comet, its tail a line of panicked humans all running after it. It might have been possible that Dog had been aware of that very occasion, sensed opportunity, and conspired to marshal every disparate piece all the way from London to the country, and afterwards to a precise time and location. Possible, in the most infinitesimal of likelihoods. Whether it had been planned or entirely accidental had remained a mystery.

Sometimes, the best way to go about life was to just accept the mystery and let things unfold as they do.

By the time everyone else caught up, Aziraphale had already been standing at the porch, watching Dog, uncertain of what to do. The animal merely wagged its tail, nudging twigs frizzled black, right along the welcome mat. It yelped excitedly. Aziraphale took a cautious step back.

Adam had been the one to get there next. 

“Oh, hello there.” he greeted, with the cordial enthusiasm of a young boy and the soundless yet stirring timbre of an old god, all at once.

Then, Anathema had come over, chastising Dog and the boy until she’d noticed familiar company. “Oh wow!” She exclaimed, with the startled shock of a person who had rarely been effectively surprised. “I didn’t think I’d ever see you again.”

“Likewise,” Aziraphale said.

“Are you here with your…” the girl asked, the tail of a question unfurling in a nebulous gesture. “Uh, with the sunglasses?”

“Crowley?”

And in that moment, the front door opened. Speak of the devil, and he doth appear. ( _A demon, rather. Well, formerly one, anyway._ )

“What the hell is going on?”

Aziraphale turned around. “Oh God,” he sighed, perhaps to the Lord, Themselves, or regarding the general state of affairs, or the suspicious timeliness of everything, including the exactness of Crowley’s entrance.

Everybody else had gotten to the porch by that point. They were all catching up, which meant exchanging bewildered looks of recognition.

“Oh God, indeed,” Crowley concurred.

And so did the people of heaven’s kingdom gather to a place at the edge of nowhere, guided by light that shone like the brightest of stars, bearing gifts and breaking bread, and making merry.

They set up a table by the beach, cut the Victoria sponge and passed it around. Madame Tracy’s largesse came in bottles and bottles of sherry, which the Them had tried to appease their curiosity. The boys spat theirs out immediately, whereas Pepper described it as being similar to a baffling drink from her childhood. After all the cake was gone, they’d passed around sparkler sticks. Naturally, Adam’s had lit up the brightest, and stayed alight for far longer than it should have. It only sputtered after he’d gotten tired from running around and letting Dog chase after him. Newt caught up with Shadwell. Anathema and Crowley swapped odd stories about the occult.

Nobody seemed to recall that it had been that very day, six years prior, when the world nearly ended, and the rest of their lives began. Either that, or it didn’t seem to matter.

Above, the moon swelled—a great big eye hanging over the dark blanket of night. Out at the edge, the sound of waves crashed and hissed. And there, on the beach, the sound of joy crackled all around like a fire during a long winter.

Everybody was there. Everything was just right.

Aziraphale loved people, so of course he’d loved it then.

A dog padded along the rocky path. An Antichrist trailed behind and wandered over to a man he’d sensed had no longer been an angel, for quite some time.

“People usually tell you what age they’ve turned, on their birthdays,” the boy said.

Neither of them had mentioned the part about the birthday. Aziraphale shivered involuntarily.

“I’d gather we’re both around maybe seven thousand and a half… _ish_.”

“That’s not very helpful for people.”

“Oh?”

“Well, you know how it is. The older you are, you stop growing and start, y’know. Going.” Adam made a motion with his hand like a light going out.

People were born and breathed and died. Of course.

“What age would you say we might be, then?”

“Hmm…” The boy who’d been an Antichrist once and chose to be human, with all its attendant aches and disturbances, tapped his feet and scrunched his face with the dedicated concentration of a philosopher forcing the incoherent tangle of their thoughts into fathomable logic. “I’d put it at fifty,” he simply said.

“Really?”

Adam shrugged. “Give or take. It’s not exactly a science, is it?”

“Fifty it is.”

And so it was.

The night grew colder. One by one, their guests left.

Aziraphale sat on a chair by an emptied table, looking out at the water, at the fuzzy horizon, thinking of a place he might never be able to return to, the eternity he’d lived and its certain and uncertain end.

A heavy blanket dropped atop his head. From behind, Crowley began to straighten it out and wrap it around him.

“You’ll catch a cold out here.”

Aziraphale shrugged.

The wind howled in the night. There was the sound of a chair scraping through coarse sand. Crowley sat next to Aziraphale and watched him look out ahead, past the dark and endless evening vista. From the corner of his vision, Aziraphale thought those eyes might have glowed golden again. Perhaps it was the moon, or the sherry, or the cold. Perhaps it was simply what he wanted to see.

“What if this is it for us?” He asked abruptly, with the choked hesitation of someone who realized halfway that he hadn’t meant to say something as frankly as he just had.

“What do you mean?”

“We stay like this. We grow old. We die. Like this. Or I die first, or you die first, and the other one has to, well—”

His babbling stopped when cold fingers came upon his mouth. It slid down to his chin and redirected his gaze. They looked at each other, eye-to-eye.

“Is that so terrible?” Crowley asked, a little too quietly.

“Maybe?”

“Well, angel. That’s life, for you.”

In another lifetime, a demon had stretched a hand toward him, through thousands of years, across the many many places that were built and were broken over the course of time, throughout the unbroken history of reckless men. In another lifetime, he’d disdained that hand, and all its unspoken offers, in either burdens and delights.

In that moment, the man he loved simply took his hand, kissed the back of it, lifted it up and guided them both out of the cold, into their home, and onto the bed they had shared.

And there, in their room, in the dark, under the covers, Crowley shifted to face Aziraphale. He regarded him with a dissonant seriousness and softness that cleaved and halved the heart.

“I miss it too, just so you know,” he admitted. “Not being a demon and tempting people. Just being… _more than this_ , I suppose.”

“I miss it all the time.”

“I won’t think less of you if you don’t think less of me.”

For a moment, they were silent and still, content to simply gaze.

Aziraphale considered the shape of their new lives, things as they were, and thought of a caravansary from years and years ago. Here they were, as uncertain as a vagrant on the frontier, navigating the breathtaking expanse of the Steppe, guided only by the faintest points of starlight.

“I hope you know that I…”

A hand came up to meet his, threading their fingers together. They gripped tightly, bracing for whatever it is that comes next.

Meanwhile, the world spun on.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The word count is 100% intentional.
> 
> Hope you all found this satisfying. Had a good ol' cry and laugh to myself writing this stuff.
> 
> Comments are love!


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